T.S. Eliot - Poetry

Ok, I've heard of T.S. Eliot before.  The poem, 'The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock' is unknown to me.  I have to believe that Eliot's best known poem is 'The Wasteland' but the title of the book is 'The 100 Best Poems of all Time', not the 100 best known.  The full poem is too long for me to type out, so I'll just give you part near the beginning.  The full deal can be found here.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-desterted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That life and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And fora  hundred visions and revisions,
Before taking of a toast and tea.

That's the first part.  As I said, the full poem is available up ahead.  You can read the full thing if you'd like.  Frankly, I didn't understand it.  (Full disclosure: I don't claim to understand 'The Wasteland' either.)  Oh, there are phrases that I like.  Further on than I typed is this: 'I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'.  What a lovely phrase!  In fact, the most meaning that I could get is that this is a long worry about life passing by.
A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that Eliot started writing this when he was about 22 and it was published five years later.  Now that I've passed forty, I can't help but . . . sigh . . . at twenty-somethings that worry about their old age.  Also per Wikipedia: "Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the narrator, it can be difficult to interpret."  So good, it's not just me.
Maybe someday, someone will sit me down and explain Eliot to me.  Until then, I'm lost.  (And I will dare to eat a peach.)

Terence

In my last post, I mentioned that the next play is by Terence, a playwright of ancient Rome.  I should have mentioned that you can read 'The Brothers' online for free here.  If you have some time, I recommend it but I'm not going to pretend that it's life changing.  Terence was one of the most important Roman authors.  Not so much, in his time, but in the time since. 
From wikipedia:

Terence's plays were a standard part of the Latin curriculum of the neo-classical period. US President John Adams once wrote to his son, "Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin...His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model."^[11]
Two of the earliest English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, are thought to parody Terence's plays.
Due to his cognomen Afer, Terence has long been identified with Africa and heralded as the first poet of the African diaspora by generations of writers, including Juan Latino, Phyllis Wheatley, Alexandre Dumas, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou.
American playwright Thornton Wilder based his novel The Woman of Andros on Terence's Andria.

 So he was a heavy and heavily influential.  The thing is, before this project, I'd never heard of him.  Ok, so there are plenty of playwrights that I've never heard of.  I'm not pretending that I'm some kind of subject expert or anything.  But Jean Genet, the author of 'The Balcony' that I just reviewed, published about 60 years ago.  It's very possible that a similar list compiled in 2100 AD wouldn't have him on it.  The play is relatively young and its star could fade quickly.  Not so with Terence.  His work has been around for more than two thousand years.  His 'classic' status is unquestionable.

Still.  It has been very enlightening to read a selection of lauded plays interspersed with some of the works of Shakespeare.  Terence was without a doubt a great influence.  His plot in 'The Brothers' is interesting and his characters are more like real people than, say, Euripides or Aeschylus.  But as classic as he (and the others) are, they don't really exceed the work done today.  Yes, modern authors are taking their plots and the tricks that these great men taught them.  Yes, they should be honored for being there first.  I'm not trying to devalue them one little jot.
But you know what?  Shakespeare is different.  If you asked 100 writers today to write a 'lost' play by Terence, you could get some reasonably close facsimiles, maybe some improvements.  If you tried the same thing with Shakespeare, you'd get 100 failures.  Yes, he was playing a somewhat different game than a modern like Stoppard, but no one can outplay him at that game. 
We can make stories that are loosely based on Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet or Macbeth, but we can't improve on them.  No one can make the characters more interesting.  No one can bend the language quite so sweetly.  No one else can take such a simple idea and make it absolutely flower into something so brilliant. 
People often glibly say that Shakespeare is the top playwright.  I've long taken that at face value.  Now that I have some more experience under my belt, I can only nod my head vigorously.  Yeah, he really is.

The Balcony - Genet (95)

This isn't a play for the faint of heart.  The Balcony is a rather involved brothel, placed in a city that has a rebellion on the outskirts.  The clients have elaborate fantasies that mostly involve themselves in a place of power.  For instance, the opening scene is of a man dressed as a bishop dealing with a penitent woman.  They are working on getting the image right so that they can project the kind of power that they lack in real life.
The contrast is provided by the actual Chief of Police, who wields power but isn't appreciated enough.  He comes to the brothel wondering if any of the clients are dressing up as him.   He's crushed to find out that no one is.  He hopes to achieve enough glory that he can justify the enormous tomb that he has planned for himself.
Yet another counterpoint is provided by a brothel worker named Chantel.  She is adopted by the revolution as an image of their virtues and designs.  She thinks that her training will make her ready for such a role (and her head is turned a bit by the attention). Whereas the men are tawdry, she is sublime in her imagery, but she's still a projection, an image, rather than a source of actual power.

The stage directions call for what sounds like an elaborate set up involving mirrors and sectional costumes.  The play debuted in 1956, in London, and I imagine it was something of a shock then.  Let me just say that this isn't anything that will be selected for a high school production . . .
I liked 'The Balcony' but this isn't really my style.  It's raw and unreal.  I found myself comparing it to 'Macbeth'.  Both plays are about power, but it's easy to imagine a real life Macbeth and (somewhat less so) a Lady Macbeth.  This isn't true of the players in the Balcony which are blown up representations, rather than actual people.  Well, to each their own.

Next up is #94, 'The Brother's by Terence, a playwright of ancient Rome. 

Shakespeare Biography

I covered this a couple of years ago and the results are here. 

Ezra Pound - Poetry

I've heard of Ezra Pound before but this poem is new to me.  Off the top of my head, I can't put him with any particular poem so that's probably my fault.  The poem is called 'Ancient Music'.  The blurb before the poem says that 'This poem almost demands to be declaimed in the most passionate voice possible'.

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
     Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
     Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm.
     So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Boy, I could have used this poem during our previous, historically awful winter.  I'm making a mental note to remember this for next January or February.  I fully, fully, understand all of the 'Goddamm'.
Do I like the poem?  I'm not sure.  The creative spelling doesn't do much for me.  In poems like 'Jaberwocky', you have actual made up words that convey meaning.  This just seems like misspelling for the sake of misspelling.  I suppose there is some extra meaning that is conveyed there, but it gets more of an eye-roll from me.
The title is 'Ancient Music' and I want to think about that for a moment.  Does this mean that people have been cursing winter since ancient times?  Probably.  And calling this 'music' seems to give it a ritualistic nod.  I can dig that.
A useful poem.

Author Timeline

BC
Aeschylus  525-456
Herodotus  484-425
Thucydides  460-395
Plato  428-348
Aristotle  384-322
Euclid  Unknown (300 BC?)
AD
Tacitus  56-117
St Thomas Aquinas  1225-1274
Chaucer  1343-1400
Shakespeare  1564-1616
Milton  1608-1674
Locke  1632-1704
Kant  1724-1804
Mill  1806-1873
Lavoisier  1743-1794
Dostoevsky  1821-1881
Freud  1856-1939

Reading for June

Only one, but it's a bloody good one.


July
Shakespeare: Macbeth link

Note: this project is now 1/4 complete.  By time, anyway.  I'm a bit past the midpoint for year three.  In the overall picture, I've now covered 46 out of 180 pieces.  If my count is correct, we've covered 37 of the 54 authors contained in the Great Books.

Update: one last word from Chaucer: 

And the joke was on Troylus, by cause the whole 'Crisedye' relaciounshippe was an experimente by Facebooke.
— Chaucer Doth Tweet (@LeVostreGC) July 1, 2014